Out of the Park Baseball 26 announced
Despite its founder and original programmer leaving last year, OOTP carries on. The 26th release in the series was announced this week for release on March 14th 2025.
For about a decade now, Out of the Park has taken over as the preeminent General Manager game. There’s no change in the licensed leagues available this year: Still MLB, U.S. minor leagues, KBO, the UK pro league, and Dutch honkbal. But a big new tournament joins the crowd this year with the World Baseball Classic licensing. A fictionalized version of the WBC tournament existed in previous releases, so it remains to be seen what this might add besides some official logos. The store page promises real WBC clubs and participants, so there’s some chance that Team Japan players currently in NPB may be allowed in-game.
No other major changes. The Player Development Lab was a genuine step forward last year, and the UI’s been slightly improved to make it a little clearer what’s happening:
The new draft UI looks like a real improvement as well:
In-stadium scoreboards will now dynamically update with real game info. It looks a little crude but decent enough:
One minor feature that stands out: “A Military Service system to replicate the real club decision making process needed for the KBO.” Football Manager (by former OOTP parent company Sports Interactive) has actually modeled this in the past already, so it’s not unprecedented to make you worry about military conscription in a sports simulation game. (RIP to this year’s Football Manager, by the way. For those crying out for MLB The Show to switch to a new engine, turns out it’s not so easy).
MLB The Show 25 gameplay updates
MLB The Show 25 showed off new features related to gameplay in the short video above, and went into more detail on a 90-minute stream. There’s not a ton to mention here:
- Ambush hitting – You guess a side of the plate, increasing your swing cursor size and timing window for the side you chose
- Infielder reaction times – Infielders will now get one of three jump animations, depending on their fielding attributes. A colored arrow on-screen will tell you which they got, with a slightly confusing color scheme: Blue is best, green is medium, and yellow is worst.
- New higher difficulty, “G.O.A.T.”
- New home run robbery meter to help with timing dramatic catches at the wall.
- Throw meters given more risk-reward, with the “perfect throw” placed at the end of the “good throw” portion of the meter instead of in its middle.
Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball research update
It’s been a couple months since this site’s last research update on Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball, a finished then canned 2005 MLB game for GameCube. Since that time, the 30-30.club encyclopedia page for the game has seen several updates:
- The credits are now as complete as possible until we can see the real thing, in either the finished game or an instruction manual. We likely now know every name that worked on the game.
- Several screenshots have been added, including a few pre-release images showing a player model and debug mode pics of stadiums.
- We now know what the disc itself looked like, through an image of a (non-playable, sadly) production sample of the disc art.
- It’s also been confirmed that the box art used a shiny foil background, similar to the Wind Waker box art on GameCube.
If you know anything about the game, please reach out via email to nate@30-30.club.
Very minor news on Backyard Baseball
The Backyard Baseball reboot continues to get write-ups in the biggest publications still left standing, which this week meant The Rolling Stone. The story retells the story we’re already familiar with here about the reboot, what its long-term aims are, and makes a sort of dubious connection to the cozy games movement.
But for here, all I’m interested in is confirmation that licensed legend players will be included in the next Backyard Sports ports, coming out at some unspecified near future date. The players listed in the piece are Barry Sanders, Lisa Leslie, Mark McGwire, Dan Marino, and Curtis Joseph.
I noticed here previously a few player names listed on the Steam store page for Backyard Baseball ’01 which were quickly removed. Mark McGwire was one of the players listed, alongside Jeremy Giambi and Chipper Jones. The original Backyard Baseball 2001 had both licensed players and licensed teams. I think the writing on the wall says this rerelease will strip out the licensed teams but find some way to include at least a similar roster of licensed players.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Do you remember when ESPN had an arcade? – I already had this video saved to include this week before sports and sports video game YouTuber Kofie announced he’d been laid off from Secret Base. It’s a reminder of a kinder internet, where ESPN.com would include a huge number of varyingly good and terrible Flash games. Anyway, it seems like Kofie is still producing plenty of content on his channel, and hopefully he continues to have a platform.
- Emmdotfrisk showed off some gameplay footage of the Bitball closed beta. Bitball‘s continued to build a lot of hype on social media, promising a return to a simpler fun of old sports games, but with a detailed franchise mode.
- Baseball Hero (Playdate) Gameplay – I got a Playdate console this week and recorded this, the only baseball game of any quality I was able to find so far. But otherwise, it’s been fun looking at the nice quality Game Boy-style screen and messing around with crank-powered gameplay.
- The Yakyuu (PS1) Gameplay – The Simple series launched a surprising number of real franchises, like Onechanbara, but this wasn’t one of them. There are a few of these very simple baseball management games though, and I’m honestly kind of into the simple art style. This first entry uses fake names though, so you have to put up with Michiro instead of Ichiro.